About Me

I am a graduate student of Psychology at Rutgers University researching how human emotions (e.g., pride, contempt) relate to and interact with: (1) prosocial behavior, (2) social and political judgments, and (3) job performance. I am also working on research at the Health, Emotion, and Behavior lab at Yale University, investigating how social and emotional learning curricula influence teacher and student interactions and outcomes.

Blog Archive

WHAT IS THE SOCIAL BRAIN?

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Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, & Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic [WEIRD] societies. Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity."

Steven Pinker

Honor: the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that every else believes that it exists.

Shakespeare

Conscience: I'll not meddle with it, it is a dangerous thing, it makes a man a coward; a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour's wife, but it detects him: 'tis a blushing shame-faced spirit, that mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills one full of obstacles: it made me once restore a purse of gold, that I found; it beggars any man that keeps it: it is turned out of all towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well, endeavors to trust to himself, and live without it. [Richard III]

Paul Bloom

Emotions set goals and establish priorities. And without them you wouldn't do anything, you couldn't do anything. Your desire to come to class to study, to go out with friends, to read a book, to raise a family, would be virtually non-existent. Life would be impossible without those emotions.....

Bob Dylan

Happy...anyone can be happy...what's the purpose of that?....

Francis Crick

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'you're nothing but a pack of neurons.'....

Richard Dawkins

If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that a resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra-good teaching in the following year. But any suggestion that the child's deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair. If it's in the genes, it is determined and nothing can be done about it. This is pernicious nonsense on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some may be harder to reverse, others may be easy. What did genes do to deserve their sinister, juggernaut-like reputation? Why are genes thought to be so much more fixed and inescapable in their effects than television, nuns or books?....

Simon Baron-Cohen

To be a man is to suffer from a particularly mild form of autism.....

Dan Gilbert

We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodities we are constantly chasing.....

David Brooks

WE construct ourselves through our behavior.....

Shakespeare

Sure, this robe of mine doth change my disposition.....

Philip Roth

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?....

Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.....

Charles Darwin

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write.....

Noam Chomsky

No one would take seriously the proposal that a human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. [Language] proves to be no less marvelous and intricate than these physical structures. Why, then, should we not study the acquisition of a cognitive structure like language more or less as we study some complex bodily organ?....

Aldous Huxley

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.....

Herman Melville

Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads.....

V. S. Ramachandran

The human brain is made up of one-hundred billion neurons - and each neuron forms about a thousand to ten-thousand contacts with other neurons - so the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, that is to say, potential brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.....

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Teaching is one of the most stressful occupations a person can have (Johnson et al., 2005; Kyriacou & Sutcliffe, 1977). Frequently identified sources of stress and decreased job satisfaction include the following:

Abundant research has focused on these emotional demands and their impact on teachers’ well-being, mental health, stress, burnout, and job satisfaction as well as on learning outcomes for students (Chan, 2006). Relatively little is known, however, about protective factors against teacher stress and burnout.

Which psychological attributes might predict less emotional exhaustion and more positive emotions, increased feelings of personal accomplishment, and greater job satisfaction among teachers?

Research suggests that emotion-regulation ability (ERA) may account for meaningful variance in the prediction of these outcomes.

The Study

The topic of emotion regulation and its relationship with teacher effectiveness is beginning to garner attention by researchers.

This study examined the relationship between emotion-regulation ability (ERA), as assessed by the Mayer– Salovey –Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), and both job satisfaction and burnout among secondary-school teachers (N =123).

It also examined the mediating effects of affect and principal support on these outcomes.

Two path models demonstrated that both positive affect and principal support mediated independently the associations between ERA and both personal accomplishment and job satisfaction. (2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)